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Kosovo's Battles Appear Headed Into the Chill of Winter

As the arrival of significant numbers of international monitors appeared weeks away, and the withdrawal of Serbian forces remained very unclear, the tensions of Kosovo province seemed to be heading today for the deep freeze of winter -- ready to reopen in spring.

Western diplomatic monitors here said they were unable to confirm whether Serbian forces had actually left Kosovo on Friday. There was still considerable skepticism about the potential effectiveness of hundreds of unarmed monitors who are supposed to go to the southern Serbian province under an agreement between Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, and the American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke to help with arms inspection and, perhaps eventually, elections.

Thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees, uprooted from their homes by Serbian tank and artillery offensives that ended two weeks ago, remained outdoors. About 150,000 others were doubled up in homes, schools and other makeshift shelter, according to officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

From the top of a dew-covered hill just steps from his plastic tent, Florim Kadriaj peered down today into Krusica, a village that has been home to his ethnic Albanian family for generations. Some of his neighbors among the birch trees in the hills here, worried by the cold and damp, have pulled up their shelters and gone back to homes badly damaged during an assault by Serbian forces three weeks ago.

But Mr. Kadriaj, 21, whose 30-member extended family includes a sister-in-law, Shukrije, who is eight months pregnant, says he cannot take the risk. Their two-story home is on what he calls the front line: within shooting range of a posse of the Serbian police.

''The Serbs have to move from Movljane for us to go back,'' Mr. Kadriaj said this morning as women in the family washed their hair in water from the creek and others prepared a fire for cooking. ''If I'm alone, I can run, but if it's 30 of us being captured in the same house, it's different.'' The Kadriajs are among refugees who remain trapped in the woods of Kosovo by Serbian forces and, in some instances, by the Kosovo Liberation Army, the rebels fighting for independence for the province's ethnic Albanian majority.

Officials from the United Nations agency say the overall number of refugees in the hills of Kosovo is steadily dwindling as autumn nights get colder and the ground remains consistently damp.

At Kisna Reka, northwest of here, a much larger group of 2,000 refugees remains outdoors, caught between a company of Yugoslav Army soldiers on one ridge and armed men of the separatist guerrillas who frequent the camp, an official of the United Nations refugee agency, Margaret O'Keefe, said today.

Under the original deadline set in the agreement between Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Holbrooke, Yugoslav Army soldiers and the Serbian police who were sent to Kosovo in March to fight the guerrillas were to have withdrawn. A new deadline, set Friday by NATO, gives Mr. Milosevic until Oct. 27. On Friday there were signs that some forces had withdrawn, American officials said. But they said they could not be specific about numbers or kinds of troops.

A media center run by the Serbian Government in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, alerted television crews late Friday afternoon that a convoy of Serbian troops was pulling out from Stimlje, about 15 miles south of the capital. A television crew followed the convoy of about 145 vehicles -- trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers -- but did so only until Pristina, leaving it unclear whether the equipment had actually left the province.

According to one estimate, each of the monitors who are supposed to come to Kosovo -- 2,000 was the initial estimate -- would cost about $100,000, making a total bill of $200 million for the salaries, housing and logistics of the team.

Some of the skepticism about the new monitoring force is based on the fact that 120 former military officers and diplomats were supposed to join a team of diplomatic monitors in Kosovo in July. The team never got beyond 50 members.

At best, a Western diplomat in Belgrade says, about 500 or 600 monitors, who are being recruited by the 54-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, would appear in Kosovo in the next two or three weeks.

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By then, colder weather will have begun to settle in, and both sides in the conflict will have hunkered down to await the spring, when hostilities are expected to resume, diplomats said.

[At the White House today, P. J. Crowley, spokesman for the National Security Council, rejected assertions that the violence in Kosovo would resume in the spring. ''We are not going to permit a return to the status quo in Kosovo,'' he said.

[The Administration is seeing ''clear indications that some troops have left and that more will leave in the next couple of days,'' Mr. Crowley said. ''We will continue to tell Milosevic what additional withdrawals he needs to make in order to be in compliance.'']

Soon, by November, it will be too late for any large-scale reconstruction of destroyed homes in Kosovo. Ms. O'Keefe of the United Nations refugee agency said that according to a rough estimate, 150,000 ethnic Albanian refugees remain camped out in temporary shelter, 50,000 have returned to their homes in recent weeks and another 50,000, who had fled across the borders to Montenegro or Albania, are staying there.

There is no large-scale return of people displaced by fighting and no visible rebuilding of homes and farmhouses.

A partial survey, recently completed by diplomatic monitors driving along main roads, included estimates that 16,000 houses had been heavily damaged during the recent Serbian offensive.

A well-to-do ethnic Albanian entrepreneur, Salih Bega, 35, who owns a sawmill in Petrova that was totally burned by Serbian forces, said he would not consider rebuilding his home or business even though he had the financial means to do so.

''I'm afraid to rebuild,'' Mr. Bega said as he showed a visitor burned transformers, buildings and the black ashes of valuable wood logs that he had imported from the neighboring republic of Montenegro, Serbia's lone remaining partner in Yugoslavia. His business, known as Graniti, was burned by Serbian forces in August and again in September. ''If I order five trucks to come from Montenegro to deliver wood, the Serbs could come and burn it all over again,'' he said.

Theoretically, Mr. Bega's business should be flourishing -- if refugees were returning to their homes to rebuild. But, he said, ''people don't have bread to eat, and I have to sell, not give, them wood.''

Up in the hills above Petrova, Mr. Kadriaj expressed similar bewilderment about the situation even as the international community has announced air surveillance of Serbian forces, increased material help and the dispatch of monitors.

''These observers can come around only during the day,'' he said. ''The Serbs shoot at night too. The police can come and kill me. How can the monitors help with that?''

The outsiders might help reduce immediate tensions. ''But nothing will change in relations between Serbs and Albanians,'' he said, suggesting that the battle between the two groups will rage on beyond this winter.

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A version of this article appears in print on October 18, 1998, on Page 1001012 of the National edition with the headline: Kosovo's Battles Appear Headed Into the Chill of Winter. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe